Watson Virtual Agent is a new way to provide automated services to your customers. It offers a cognitive, conversational self-service experience that can provide answers and take action. You can easily customize your Watson Virtual Agent to fit your specific business needs, provide custom content and match your business brand. Additionally, deep analytics provide insights on your customer's engagement with the Watson Virtual Agent and help with the understanding of your constantly changing customer's needs.

Artificial intelligence programs have beaten chess masters and TV quiz show champions. Two exchange operators have announced plans to launch artificial intelligence tools for market surveillance in the coming months and officials at a Wall Street regulator tell Reuters they are not far behind. Executives are hoping computers with humanoid wit can help mere mortals catch misbehavior more quickly. The software could, for instance, scrub chat-room messages to detect dubious bragging or back slapping around the time of a big trade. It could also more quickly unravel complex issues, like "layering," where orders are rapidly sent to exchanges and then canceled to artificially move a stock price.

This week's top Machine Learning stories, including a rise in freelance AI gigs, new ways to tackle wage gap issues, and more! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments. The trend toward machine learning reaches freelancers as Upwork notes a significant increase in the opportunities for freelance AI work. Sift Science and other startups tackle internal expense fraud, leveraging machine learning to detect and predict instances of fraud in enterprise commerce technology.

'Siri, catch market cheats': Wall Street watchdogs turn to artificial intelligence Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Imagine a security camera that can understand and analyze the scene it's capturing. The camera can spot someone who is leaving a piece of luggage behind at an airport and issue an alert. It can identify a car being sought in connection with a crime based on its color, shape, and dented left bumper, even if the license plate has been covered up. And it can spot drivers who are texting when they should be watching the road, potentially passing on this information to law enforcement officials that can then issue a ticket. These are some of the advanced security techniques being hyped by Movidius, a chip maker specializing in artificial intelligence and computer vision.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is convinced we are in the "third era of technology," as IBM's Watson Health partners with Quest Diagnostics to offer its cognitive computing technology nationwide for the first time.

Bank of America has unveiled its new artificial intelligent (AI) chatbot to help customers make decisions on their finances. Called Erica, a nod to the name America, it will be available inside the bank's mobile app in 2017. Customers can do the usual AI stuff – chat via text or voice – and it's all 24/7. As Banking Technology reported in June, humans are becoming obsolete in its modernisation quest. However, Michelle Moore, Bank of America's head of digital banking, says Erica is "designed to streamline the banking process, not replace jobs".

There's no denying that our smartphones have made our lives so much easier, putting our contacts and schedules, our driving directions, the whole internet, right at our fingertips. But if you're using an Android phone you might be leaving even more convenience on the table. There are a bunch of super-smart settings in Nougat and Google Now that'll make your Android device feel like it's 10 steps ahead of you. Your Android phone can be proactively telling you how long it'll take to get to work in the morning, and nudging you when your favorite team is about to take the field. Your device can keep itself unlocked whenever it's on you, and those snapshots you just took can automatically be arranged into beautiful collages.

Apple has accidentally revealed what appear to be the headline features of its brand new MacBook Pro. The company is holding an event this week where the new computer is expected to be revealed, potentially alongside some other new Mac products. But it might have accidentally shown its hand too early, accidentally unveiling the new computer in hidden screenshots in the new version of macOS. Buried within the files of the updated operating system are a set of photos that appear to be intended to serve as part of the guide of using the computer. Scavengers have already found their way into those resource files and found information about the new computer. Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

Your consumers spend a lot of time exploring and analyzing suitable information―which books to study, which news articles to read, which songs to play, which movies to watch, which games to play, and so on. Imagine, what their experience would be like, if they don't need to pick anything on their own, but are presented with options of their liking―be it in education or media or entertainment. Here are some of the things they can be offered: • Adaptive text-books, in which content changes based on the pace of learning and comfort level of the reader. Such advancements reduce the overall time spent on information discovery, and increase the scope of effective information consumption (or learning). Domains such as education, publishing, entertainment, and advertisement mostly deal with granular digital assets (text, images, audio, video, multi-media, and so on), and are better prepared to enhance personalization even without creating new content from scratch.